Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Crime Raves: U. S. Mystery Bestsellers, 1937-1939

Who done it? Atlanta burns in the
film version of Gone with the Wind

In the U. S. the fiction market in 1937 was dominated by, not altogether surprisingly, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, which had been published on June 30 of the previous year. It stayed at number one until July 1937.

Also big that year were Walter D. Edmonds' Drums along the Mohawk, Somerset Maugham's Theatre, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, James Hilton's We Are Not Alone, Vaughan Wilkins' And So--Victoria and A. J. Cronin's The Citadel. Popping up briefly were Virginia Woolf's The Years and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not.

In crime fiction, the following books made it to the bestsellers lists in 1937:

1938 saw Sinclair Lewis briefly hit the top of the list with The Prodigal Parents, followed by Marjorie K. Rawlings with The Yearling. By the end of the year Gone with the Wind was on top again, spurred on by film hype, no doubt.

Also big were The Mortal Storm by Phyllis Bottome, The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield, The Proud Heart by Pearl S. Buck, Hope of Heaven by John O'Hara, My Son, My Son! by Howard Spring and All This, and Heaven Too by Rachel Field. A brief appearance was made by Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.

In 1939 Pearl S. Buck's The Patriot briefly took the #1 spot, before being swamped by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the biggest fiction hit in the U. S. since Gone with the Wind.

Other notable successes that year were The Web and the Rock by Thomas Wolfe, Next to Valour by John Jennings, The Brandons by Angela Thirkell, Captain Horatio Hornblower by C. S. Forester, Christmas Holiday by Somerset Maugham, Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley, Christ in Concrete by Pietro di Donato and The Nazarene by Sholem Asch. Also popping up were William Fauklner's The Wild Palms, Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, and Nevil Shute's Ordeal.

In the world of crime and mystery in 1939 bestsellerdom we see:

January#3 Rebecca, Daphne du MaurierFebruary#2 Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier#15 Murder for Christmas, Agatha Christie (for some reason this was released in the US six weeks after Christmas)

Of 375 spaces listed for this three-year period, mysteries occupied 45, or 12%. Only four mysteries racked the top five: Oppenheim's Ask Miss Mott, Eberhart's The Pattern, Rinehart's The Wall and du Maurier's Rebecca.

Only the latter two novels, plus James M. Cain's Serenade, were on the bestseller lists for more than a month, The Wall and Serenade for two, Rebecca for six.
As I've mentioned before, a lot of readers in those days simply did not buy hardcover mysteries ($2 a pop!), but rather rented them for a few cents a day from lending libraries. So when a mystery made the bestseller lists, it was a particular special accomplishment.Rebecca is the most anomalous book of the mystery bestsellers, one that, as they say, "transcended the genre." Yet what was Rebecca but a brilliant updating of those once tremendously popular Gothic novels?

22 mystery writers are represented, below ranked in terms of number of times they appear on the lists:

Fourteen men and eight women, Thirteen American and nine British (including NZ). Five of the women are British, but only four of the men. We see the development of the idea of the Crime Queens, with Christie, Sayers and Marsh, though there is no Allingham and Christie was yet to attain #1 bestsellerdom.

Prince of StorytellersE. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946)

Du Maurier, Rinehart and Eberhart represent more of the the Gothic mystery tradition and there is some stuff more in the nature of hard-boiled (Latimer, Cain, Pentecost, Page) the modern thriller (Household) and the police procedural (Reilly, including one of the popular Crimefiles dossiers), but many are classic detection and thrillers, including, most surprisingly to me, a miracle problem mystery by Clayton Rawson, a disciple of John Dickson Carr, who also shows up once (June 1939 seems to have been a great month for crime fiction).

Fittingly, we even have a final appearance by S. S. Van Dine, the great American mystery bestseller from the 1920s--albeit with a rather bad book! I imagine the popularity of Gracie Allen and the release of the film of the same title helped.

So, who in the late 1930s were the most popular American mystery writers, the prolific producers regularly hitting the bestseller lists? We have Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Mignon Eberhart (often dubbed "American's Agatha Christie") and E. Phillips Oppenheim, a English thriller writer who had been churning 'em out since the Victorian era. Not for nothing, evidently, was he dubbed the Prince of Storytellers! "Oppy" had a long reign.

11 comments:

I never would've thought that Page's book made the bestseller list. Lighthearted with lots of wisecracks it has a bibliomystery theme. It was turned into a movie in 1938 the same year it was published. Plus, it was one of the earliest Red Badge Prize winners from Dodd Mead. I can imagine both those points were used in the advertising campaign to help increase sales. Interestingly Cancelled in Red was also a Red Badge Prize Winner. That book is about stamp collecting and murder. Can you imagine a book about stamp collecting being a bestseller these days? The movies probably had a powerful influence on the book buying public during these two years. As only one example of the writers you cite -- Eberhart had three movies in theaters released in 1938, but all based on other books than those listed as bestsellers above.

Yes, I think that's a great point about the prizes (you'll notice that on the Dodd, Mead jacket flaps there's a lot of promotion for Fast Company) and the films. I think with Eberhart, Rinehart and Christie the serializations in the slicks were huge too.

A.J. Cronin and Nevil Shute are two of my favourite authors and I continue to read and reread their books as and when I find them, which isn't easy in my neck of the woods. As a teenager I remember being in awe of Cronin's writing style in BEYOND THIS PLACE.

How did you like it, by the way? Yes, he was still writing when World War Two broke out. In fact in 1945 he was planning to write a novel dealing with WW2, but he got sick and passed away. I don't know whether there was anything started.

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About Me

Author of "Masters of the 'Humdrum' Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961"
"Magisterial"--Michael Dirda
"Edgar Committee, Mystery Writers of America, take note!"--Allen J. Hubin
"This should be a certain Edgar nominee"--Jon L. Breen, Mystery Scene
"Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing."
"Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene" (editor and contributor)
"The Spectrum of English Murder: The Detective Fiction of Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher and GDH and Margaret Cole"
and the Edgar-nominated "Murder in the Closet: Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall" (editor and contributor)